What Is KingsCrowd?
KingsCrowd is an independent research and ratings platform dedicated to equity crowdfunding. Founded in 2018, it has become the most widely used third-party analysis tool for retail investors evaluating deals on platforms like Republic, StartEngine, and WeFunder.
The platform collects over 350 data points per company and produces a numerical rating that attempts to capture the overall investment potential of a raise. It's not perfect — no rating system is — but it provides a useful, data-driven starting point for due diligence.
The Five Metrics
KingsCrowd's overall rating is built from five sub-scores, each weighted to produce a composite:
1. Price
This metric compares the company's current valuation to similar companies raising at the same stage and in the same sector. A company raising at a reasonable valuation relative to its peers will score higher than one that appears overpriced. KingsCrowd also considers revenue multiples and valuation growth over time.
What I look for: A Price score that isn't dragging down the overall rating. Overpaying at the seed stage is one of the most common mistakes retail investors make.
2. Market
KingsCrowd conducts its own market sizing research, estimating the total addressable market (TAM), growth rate, and overall market potential. Companies in large, fast-growing markets score higher.
What I look for: A market that is large enough to support a venture-scale outcome, but not so broad that the company's positioning is unclear.
3. Differentiation
This score considers competitive positioning: the number of direct competitors, whether the product offers a better quality-to-price ratio, patents, barriers to entry, and strategic partnerships.
What I look for: A clear, defensible answer to the question "why can't a well-funded competitor just copy this?"
4. Performance
The performance score looks at the company's current stage (pre-launch, pre-revenue, pre-profit, profitable), revenue and growth rates, burn rate, and balance sheet health.
What I look for: Some evidence of traction. Pre-revenue companies can still score well here if the team has strong prior exits, but I'm more cautious about companies with no product and no customers.
5. Team
KingsCrowd evaluates founders on years of relevant experience, network size, prior exits, education, and team cohesion. They also consider the quality of advisors and notable investors.
What I look for: Founders who have done something hard before. Prior exits are a strong signal, but deep domain expertise in the specific market is equally valuable.
How I Use the Scores
My rule is simple: I will not consider any deal with a KingsCrowd score below 3.5. This is a hard filter, not a suggestion.
The 3.5 threshold is not arbitrary. Based on KingsCrowd's own published research, deals scoring above 3.5 have historically shown significantly better outcomes than the broader market. It's not a guarantee of success — far from it — but it filters out the weakest deals efficiently.
Once a deal clears the 3.5 threshold, I use the sub-scores to understand where the strength and weakness lies. A company with a 4.2 overall score driven entirely by a strong Team score but a weak Price score tells me something very different from one with balanced scores across all five metrics.
The Limitations
KingsCrowd is a useful tool, but it has real limitations that every investor should understand:
It's backward-looking. The scores are based on data available at the time of the raise. A company's fortunes can change dramatically after the round closes.
It doesn't capture everything. Founder personality, product quality, and market dynamics are hard to quantify. A 4.0 score doesn't mean a company is a good investment — it means it scores well on the metrics KingsCrowd measures.
Coverage is uneven. KingsCrowd covers more deals on WeFunder and StartEngine than on Republic or Crowdcube. Some deals you'll want to evaluate won't have a KingsCrowd rating at all.
Use it as a starting point, not a conclusion.
Sources: KingsCrowd Startup Rating Methodology (kingscrowd.com). All opinions are my own.
